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Someone who knows the timeline here will have to verify for me but as I understand it, first congress was exempt from the ACA by the Dems, then were added after protest, and now republicans want to exempt themselves from the AHCA state waivers. If that isn't an endorsement of the ACA I don't know what is.

I don't get the political math here. I'm suspecting in the end it's 'Trump wants this.'

As far as I can tell the benefits of this bill are pleasing a small but outspoken segment of constituents and being able to say you delivered a promise.
The cons are almost every related organization is against it, no one can demonstrate its benefit (and they're voting before it gets scored), you piss of most of the rest of your constituents, don't not make the system appreciably better, and you violate lots of the standards you claim to hold about passing legislation. Also there's the chance this dies in the Senate.

I'm utterly confused. Basically it seems like they're doing it just to say they did.

Honest question here. Has anyone seen any tangible documentation from the Republican party that describes in detail what exactly is wrong with the ACA and how the AHCA is fixing it? All I've gleaned from TV/Internet is that ACA is bad/broken and a group of 50+ year old out-of-touch white guys have fixed it. My guess is that by "fixing" it, they reduced the tax burden on a strategic group of people. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with actual health care.

Didn't the GOP cause most of the problems with the ACA though? They sued several times to prevent certain parts of it being implemented like making payments to the insurance companies to cover certain losses and some states refused free federal medicaid funding because of something the GOP did or blocked or sued for. I don't pretend to understand all the details.

I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....

Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?

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May 10, 2017, 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by Atheist

Honest question here. Has anyone seen any tangible documentation from the Republican party that describes in detail what exactly is wrong with the ACA and how the AHCA is fixing it?

A big sticking point was the "If you like your health care plan you can keep it." that was repeated over and over and turned out not be true, as many insurance companies chose to cancel plans instead of modify them to meet Obamacare's strict requirements for coverage.

People also complain that premiums are too high for many plans.

Obama did an ~hour long interview with Vox late last year about the state of Obamacare, he acknowledged that premiums were too high and expressed a desire to increase subsidies, but noted that Republicans would not sign off on spending more money.

BadKosh: Per Chongo's rules, you have to read the entirety of the text of the ACA before you're allowed to criticize it. Please let us know when you've finished reading it all.

Well, we need to pass it first in order to determine what's actually in it, so per Chongo's rules we need to vote on it before any reading can be started. Votes on the floor!

Nay.

I also don't see how making someone read through 33,000 pages of legalese could possibly support your argument, as if somehow that's a good thing. I think being able to read the law is exactly the type of thing we should be going for.

To that point, the republican measure is 132 pages.

The ACA is 217 times longer than HR1628.

For every page of reading you would have to do for HR1628, you would need to read 217 pages of the ACA to keep pace.

You could read the Republican bill 217 times before completing the ACA.

If it took you a week to read HR1628, it would take you two years to read the ACA at the same pace.

If you stacked up the ACA on standard letter paper, it would be over 7 ft tall. You could literally drop the ACA on someone and kill them.

I can write a one sentence health care plan. It is the absolute best, the best health care plan ever conceived.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

(not saying that things shouldn't be as concise and easy to read as possible, but Trump is always exclaiming in surprise, "wow, this was more complicated than I thought" because he doesn't understand all the COMPLEXITY involved. )

What argument do you think I'm making? Or are you continuing to group me in the collective "you" of the left?

The argument that anyone should or even could read the ACA in it's entirety in order to understand it enough to criticize it. Your argument being that you must understand it's entirety to criticize it. Looking back, I think you were trying to point out just that and I let it sail right over my head.

Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?

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May 11, 2017, 05:42 PM

Originally Posted by Snow-i

The argument that anyone should or even could read the ACA in it's entirety in order to understand it enough to criticize it. Your argument being that you must understand it's entirety to criticize it. Looking back, I think you were trying to point out just that and I let it sail right over my head.

No, I was just pointing out Chongo's stupidity and hypocrisy. Saying "You can't criticize a bill until you've personally read it all" while criticizing a whole lot of legislation just because there's a (D) after the politician's name.

No, I was just pointing out Chongo's stupidity and hypocrisy. Saying "You can't criticize a bill until you've personally read it all" while criticizing a whole lot of legislation just because there's a (D) after the politician's name.

Fair enough.

33,000 pages is alot. It's almost like they got George RR Martin to write the damn thing and didn't give him a year to edit it down.

I want to know if any of you guys that support an insurance-based system have thought that maybe this system can't be fixed, and if not if there is a certain point or benchmark where you'll start to think this?

Our Canadian system isn't perfect, but I don't know of any Canadians that feel that it is just utterly and fundamental broken. However, I'm not particularly interested in Americans telling Canadians what is wrong with their health care and vice versa because we've gone down that road before, but I'm just looking to calibrate myself on what you are feeling about US healthcare, because it seems like there is such incredible and relentless persistence to repair the insurance based system. I'm just wondering at what point people will start to be open to something entirely different (whether single payer or something else).

Insurance-based or single-payer both work. Without one or the other, mostly the wealthy have health coverage. For non-wealthy (the majority) having neither creates a faith-based healthcare system: Price healthcare out of reach, and fewer people get sick. This doesn't seem to work - it's been tried extensively in 3rd world countries. Still being tested vigorously today.

If Trumpcare goes through, we don't have single-payer, and insurance-based will lose its' pool size. ie - the underlying requirements of a working insurance system get removed. So we end up with unaffordable insurance-based, which is equivalent to no coverage. Being poor is unhealthy, and being middle-class is temporary until one emergency takes everything away. In the long run, everyone needs healthcare at some point, or we die.